From VANDANA SHIVA
Via Transition Culture
The most important pressure people in the South face is the grabbing of their resources to feed a consumer machinery where the rich North doesn’t really benefit from that consumption, but it thinks it’s benefiting.
A Transition Town movement in the North, that reduces the pressure on the South, while maintaining solidarity on issues where the North can’t provide for itself — you can’t grow your coffee, you can’t grow your spices in Europe, you can’t grow your cotton — a Transition Town movement in the North needs to shrink its ecological footprint in areas where it is shrinkable, and it needs to generate more livelihood locally in production and the first candidate for this is fresh vegetables.
Fresh vegetables are the reason Third World people are losing their land. Fresh vegetables do not get exported by small peasants… giant companies take over the land, put green beans and lettuce onto flights, and ship it to the North.
So if you reduce your consumption of long distance flights for vegetables, and increase your local production ecologically, you are reducing the pressure on the South, you are making sure families don’t go hungry in the South.
That’s the kind of solidarity that helps.
Go to video at Transition Culture→
See also Sharon Astyk’s Comments→
[This is the reason the so-called “Green Revolution” is a disaster for the world. -DS]